A runaway heiress meets a poor but charming newspaper reporter while she's on the lam, antipathy turns to love, and they encounter an assortment of oddball characters. It's the ideal premise for a screwball comedy, and has been the basis for many of them. But none did it better than the original, It Happened One Night (1934), the film that's credited with inventing the genre.

The movie is also often credited with establishing Clark Gable's star persona. He was already on the rise at MGM, where his sex appeal was being exploited in a series of roles as gangsters and gigolos. But he was tiring of such casting, which ironically led to the clash with studio head Louis B. Mayer that resulted in his being punished with a loan to Columbia to make It Happened One Night. Director Frank Capra brought out the real Gable in his performance, establishing the breezy, wise-cracking but self-assured common man he would play for the rest of his career.

Claudette Colbert's legs and Clark Gable's chest were the sensations of It Happened One Night. In the motel room scene, Gable demonstrates how a man undresses. When he took off his shirt, he wore no undershirt. Capra explained that the reason for this was that there was no way Gable could take off his undershirt gracefully, but once audiences saw Gable's naked torso, sales of men's undershirts plummeted. The rest of Gable's simple wardrobe -- Norfolk jacket, v-neck sweater, and trench coat -- also became a men's fashion fad.

The reviews for It Happened One Night were excellent, but no one really expected much from the film. After a slow opening, it received great word-of-mouth, and the film picked up steam at the box office. James Harvey, in his book Romantic Comedy In Hollywood, believes that the film succeeded because the couple transcended their stock characters. "There was some kind of new energy in their style: slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental - and powerfully romantic. Audiences were bowled over by it."

At Oscar® time, It Happened One Night surprised the industry when it was nominated in all five major categories, and stunned everyone when it won them all: Best Actor, Actress, Picture, Director, and Screenplay. It was the first-ever sweep of the awards, a feat that would not be repeated for another 40 years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, which shows you something about the changing taste of moviegoers.